Teacher- and peer-scaffolding behaviors: effects on EFL students' writing improvement

This paper reports a study conducted within the sociocultural framework and aimed at investigating the effect of scaffolding on EFL students’ writing ability. The study intended to find out whether teacher- or peer-scaffolding was more successful in helping students improve their English texts. To this end, two groups of university students who enrolled in general English course were provided with teacher- and peer-scaffolding in the process of revising their writings. Pre- and post-writing tasks were collected from the students to check their writing improvement. Results of t-tests showed that teacher scaffolding appeared to be more successful on improving students' writing in this particular EFL context. It was also found that both the teacher and peers used many different scaffolding behaviors; however, the teacher used more such behaviors in mediating students’ writing. Findings of the study contribute to the present literature on scaffolding studies as well as ESL writing instruction.